Capability Driven Development of Context-aware Enterprise Applications – Challenges, Approach and Experiences

Enterprises are facing the need to adapt their businesses according to various situations in which their applications need to be used. To answer this challenge an EU FP7 project “Capability as a Service in digital enterprises” (CaaS) has been initiated. The aim of CaaS is to support the capture and analysis of changing business context in the design of information systems (IS) using the capability notion. Capability is seen as the ability and capacity that enables an enterprise to achieve a business goal in a certain context. The key rationale behind a capability driven approach is to capture the dependence of organizational and IS designs on application context and to provide explicit support for run-time adjustments according to changes in the application situation. The CaaS project is developing a methodology and a tool environment for capability driven development. We envision to further advance the service oriented paradigm and to develop context aware business capabilities by using Enterprise Modelling techniques as a starting point of the development process, capability design patterns for reuse of best practices, as well as composition of required capabilities and algorithms for run-time adjustment. This talk will address the main principles of the capability driven development methodology, as well as present the current experiences of capability design in three use case companies of the CaaS project – SIV AG (Germany) for business process outsourcing, Fresh T Limited (UK) for compliance management, and Everis (Spain) for capability management in e-government platforms